CROSSING BOUNDARIES

Sunday: 1st September, 2019

Reference text : Luke 14:1,7-14

Luke 14:1,7 One Sabbath, when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable:

‘What am I here to do?’ Whenever we think of this question in different circumstances, we will come up with diverse answers. As an example, at a dinner, you are invited to eat and in an audience, probably to deliver a talk hence, the inclination to do just that. It can therefore be a bit tricky navigating the fine lines that separate each of these roles to know when it is okay to cross them.

Jesus had been invited to the house of a Pharisees to dine but in typical Jesus-style, he donned the cloak of a teacher and began addressing concerns He had observed because there was a good opportunity to. His approach tells us that

stepping beyond our ‘expected duties’ should create no problems as long as we do not lose sight of what exactly we desire to achieve

My dear, many of the situations we encounter in life could be avoided with simple statements like ‘that is not my job’ or ‘that is not why I am here’; and we won’t be wrong to say so. However, there will also be many moments, like we see in the Gospel, when we will have to step out of set roles and responsibilities into others.

Boundaries are designed to keep things defined and establish distinct duties. However, there is always some room for reasonable overlaps and that is what we ought to take advantage of if we wish to have bigger impacts.

Opportunities to make differences will not always fit within the brackets we put ourselves in terms of skill set, position or job description;

we may have to broaden our scope or step across some boundaries.

#sly